


Imagine a Figure 8

by fourfreedoms



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-02
Updated: 2009-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:16:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/pseuds/fourfreedoms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean both say yes to Michael and Lucifer. In order to stop Lucifer and the apocalypse, Michael thrusts them both outside time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imagine a Figure 8

“Do you ever wonder if we start to take on our vessel’s characteristics?” Lucifer asks, blowing his bangs up out of his eyes. He’s glad he doesn’t seem to have to cut it here. He doesn’t have to shave either.

“No,” Michael says shortly. He doesn’t look up from the bookshelf he’s building for books they don’t have.

The only sound in this place, beyond that of their voices, is the steady pounding of his hammer. Lucifer snorts and doesn’t take him seriously. Michael doesn’t like Dean—maybe he’s even embarrassed by him. He was probably hoping for a protestant schoolteacher or somebody who ran soup kitchens. Instead he got thornmallow, prickly on the outside but squishy and soft within. It doesn’t matter how he feels about Dean. Ever since Michael thrust them both outside time and sealed the door behind them, he’s been softening and developing all sorts of idiosyncrasies.

“What’s that song you’re humming?” Lucifer asks, lying on his back, staring up at gray nothingness. He’s been peering at it for days, trying to make the heavens form above him. The stars or maybe the sunset sky would be a welcome change.

“Excuse me?” Michael says, finally looking up from his carpentry. He’s got a nail in the corner of his mouth and another one in his hand.

Lucifer rolls onto his side to face him and props his head on his hand. “Black Sabbath,” he says and smiles.

“You would know,” Michael replies grumpily and viciously hammers the nail into cheap pine. He’d wanted oak, but it took too long to imagine it back into existence so he gave up and dealt with the pine that came out of his first attempts.

Lucifer sighs and shakes his head. “That was really pathetic.”

Michael looks up, green eyes flashing. He points at Lucifer with his hammer. “You want to talk about pathetic? Nothing is as pathetic as your whole ‘I loved him too much’ crap!”

Lucifer flops back onto the ground with a beleaguered sigh. “Oh, not this again.”

He fists his fingers in the velvety gray something that is really nothing at all. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been here. He doesn’t count like Michael does—marking out each day with a stump of imagined charcoal. They’re built to last longer than the energizer bunny so it hardly matters how much time has gone before. They’ll be here forever.

Lucifer regrets not knowing what’s going to happen outside. That economist just came out with that book, _Super Freakonomics_ , with all those short term solutions to global climate change that humans were sure to misunderstand. Between that and Wall Street, Lucifer probably needn't have bothered to bust out. If he'd stayed in hell at least he could see what was going on. His father had allowed him that much.

Michael pounds away so steadily it sounds like striking a drum or the pulse of a human’s relentless heart. Lucifer closes his fists tighter and grunts in surprise when he feels wet earth underneath his borrowed fingernails. When he sits up he sees grass growing in all directions as far as the eye can see (about 29 miles, perfectly calibrated to the curvature of the earth, He really had thought of everything). Against the gray horizons it looks like a vibrantly emerald shag rug.

Michael makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and pretends he doesn’t notice. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He built himself a bed and a little sink to wash at. He has a light to hang above his crudely fashioned furniture even though it never gets dark here. On the first day he set it up he couldn’t get it to turn on until Lucifer put his fingers to the newly imagined bulb and it flickered to life.

At the annoyed look Michael sent him, he put his finger to his lower lip and said, “‘Like a match.’” A look of betrayal crossed over Michael’s face after that and Lucifer finally went to go sit out of sight.

Every day Michael folds and refolds the clothes Dean was wearing when they went through the portal, but he always wears the things he imagined for himself instead. Lucifer figures he just needs to be doing something. In the beginning he did nothing, just watched Lucifer scream and pound at the walls of their endless gray cage for days. Michael had hardly moved, mouth drawn into a thin line, until Lucifer realized it was futile and he’d spent millennia imprisoned in hell for absolutely nothing only to end it here, under Michael’s disapproving gaze. It was a strangely calming realization.

He renews his staring at the sky. It stays gray and boring, but now it has the shifting wispy look like a fog has rolled in. Lucifer grins. Progress. “Would you stop that?” Michael says, setting his hammer down on top of the unfinished bookshelf with a loud thunk. He glares at Lucifer over his shoulder.

Lucifer languishes on the grass just to annoy him.“You know, if I bother you so much, why don’t you build a wall?” Michael blinks at him and Lucifer laughs. “It never even occurred to you, did it?” Michael doesn’t answer; he imagines another cheap pine 2x4 and starts pounding it down. Lucifer laughs again. “Now I know why I was his favorite.”

“You were not his favorite!” Michael growls, back stiffening.

Lucifer waves a hand at him. “I was everybody’s favorite.” He rolls up to his feet. He smooths down the white pajama pants that he imagined for himself first. Sam has no style. “Including yours.”

Michael stills again, staring at Lucifer’s bare chest out of the corner of his eye. “And you served us well for it.”

Lucifer throws himself on Michael’s bed. “You know, we’re going to be stuck here forever, so you might as well get over that.” He cocks his head. “Unless you think He’s going to forgive me?”

“Get out of my bed!” Michael says, ignoring Lucifer’s question entirely. Lucifer shakes his head and Michael dives at him. They roll across the mattress, wrestling, pulling at each other, trying to get the upper hand. Michael wins. He was built for this after all. He presses Lucifer’s arms back to his imagined flannel bed sheets with punishing hands. Lucifer smiles up at him. He raises a thigh, pressing it hard against Michael’s groin, smirking as Michael inhales raggedly.

“Humans weren’t made right,” Michael says weakly, blush settling across his cheeks.

Lucifer uses his discomfiture to tumble Michael over so that Lucifer’s on top. “You think _this_ is why humans are flawed?”

Michael doesn’t answer. His lips harden into that same resolved line that always pisses Lucifer off. Lucifer gets a hand between them, cupping over Michael’s dick and squeezing. “This is how they’re right,” he says, grinding his palm down.

Michael’s mouth opens on a silent moan. His cheeks darken. “I don’t know what—” he says and breaks off.

“I do,” Lucifer replies and seizes his mouth in a kiss. Michael is clumsy, hesitant, but he doesn’t break away. When Lucifer licks over that beautiful lower lip, it awakens something in Michael. He shoves a hand through Lucifer’s hair and grips it tight. His kiss turns rough, just a fraction away from vicious. They roll again so that Michael is on top. He sits up, straddling Lucifer’s hips, unconsciously shifting down onto his dick. Lucifer opens his mouth around a moan and reaches out to close his hand on Michael’s thigh. The muscles clench under his hand.

“We shouldn’t,” Michael says, tracing a delicate finger over the flesh that separates his hand from Sam’s heart. He trails his thumb wonderingly over Lucifer’s left nipple and watches it harden.

Lucifer closes his eyes, shuts off the sight of Michael kneeling over him, flushed and panting. Lucifer whispers, “He doesn’t care anymore.”

Michael bends, mouth hovering over Lucifer’s. “Don’t,” he says shortly and then seals their mouths together a second time, tongue twining around Lucifer’s so beautifully he must be cheating. That is all Dean. Lucifer slides his hand up Michael's thigh, reaching around to cup his ass. Michael flexes against him, bites at his lower lip, and Lucifer thinks, at last, he's won something.

*

Two things. Did anybody catch that thornmallow reference? also, I was just poking around when I was trying to think up a title and I found this:

_Augustine of Hippo wrote that time exists only within the created universe, so that God exists outside of time; for God there is no past or future, but only an eternal present._

From this [article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity) on wikipedia. I thought it applied rather nicely to their situation.


End file.
